City of Sleeping Hearts
by ParanoiaFuel
Summary: You head over to a favorite author's shelf and while browsing through it…something catches your eye. Rested in between two hardcover books is an olive spiral-bound notebook. What will you do? Well the choice is obvious; you take it out. Summer Human!stuck Katnep.


Your name is Karkat Vantas and you're currently being trampled, pushed back and forth by torrents of people excited to start the Summer and they obviously had no sense of respect whatsoever for another person's well being.

You shove and push back eager to just get the hell out of there ignoring the shouts and reprimanding of others.  
Soon enough, after trudging through the wave of students as if they were the thick undergrowth of a huge-ass jungle you see the light, okay, you're just being dramatic but it was an exit nonetheless.

The people disperse as soon as they get out of the gates going in separate ways and so do you, no need to dwell in there while it was getting dark.

You take route of a familiar street.  
One of the few local bookstores around town wasn't far and it wasn't like you were hurrying.  
You liked this one in particular though because it was quiet but a comfortable kind of quiet nothing like the eerie kind that just heavies the already lonely atmosphere back at home that and they had the best books.

This year you were an orphan, it was voluntary of course and it was only temporary for half this Summer. You see, your mother and father haven't spoken with each other since you were Five, and your mother had just skedaddled off with your older brother Kankri, who had favored her more, to Seattle and you chose to stay with your dad.

Your dad was a professor, or something, he usually came home late so most of the time and you'd have the entire house for yourself and that may have sounded like a rad thing but honestly it just gets lonelier in there but you didn't hate him for it

(One, for spending barely any time for you ever since you were five and two for having you scrap for yourself during the entire day while he was at work,)

He was just doing his work after all, right? He may have been leaving you around to do whatever you want but at least he was feeding and supporting you.  
Oh right, you side-tracked for a bit there, this year your dad had abandoned you for a well deserved vacation and you let him, because, well, he did need it. (And it took you a while of assuring and yelling at him that you were fine with it .)

He expected you to be with your mom and brother by the second of week of Summer when he left but you really weren't planning on going. You had already told your mother that you'd be spending the vacation with your dad and to him that you'd be staying with her.

Besides one and a half months of having the entire home for yourself wasn't too bad, or so you thought. You quickly pulled yourself out of your thoughts having found yourself in front of the small bookstore.

It wasn't much different from the others you came across around town.  
Its exterior made it seems smaller than it really was on the inside and the place was pretty cozy.  
Glass windows displayed shelves upon shelves of books from the inside and on the left of course was a door.  
Looking up you see the very familiar sign that read, "_The Spider's Web_" an odd name, you had to agree but you had never really put much thought into it.

The brass door bell above chimes upon your arrival and almost immediately you are greeted by a woman clad in cobalt blue, one Aranea Serket.

"Back so soon, Karkat?" she waves from behind her desk.

You return the gesture to be polite with a simple "Yeah."  
and she pesters you no further, leaving you to wander about.

You were bookish, if that was a word. You enjoyed books of the Romantic-Comedy genre and you believe that you've read everyone one of them, or at least most of what you could find in Aranea's bookstore, but a sizable amount enough to make you just want to outright brag about all the titles you knew and which book was good and which one was shit (To save people from the horror.)  
It was socially unacceptable because said genre was rather girlish and you really didn't want to be given shit for it.

You could've been out there hanging with your friends but chances are that they'd either be packing up to have their Summer vacation elsewhere or they'll just be preferring to play dumb games on their computers or Xboxes in a dark room.

You head over to a favorite author's shelf and while browsing through it…something catches your eye.

Rested in between two hardcover books is an olive spiral-bound notebook.

What will you do?

Well the choice is obvious; you take it out.

* * *

**_Short chapter. Kinda introductory._**


End file.
